‘The early days in my little kingdom were full of splendour. The flowers of summer had reached full bloom. The birds sang in orchestrated harmony and echoed my own contentment: I was spoiled and mollycoddled to an excessive but wondrous degree, totally befitting the arrival of the first son in a family of girls. Attractive girls, I might add, who innocently played with me while I took every opportunity to look up their skirts. Life was simply perfection. Even as a child I was a dirty old man. Between meals I sat in my pram and gazed up at the green, tree-lined street and never had to lift a finger; my every whim was catered for by my adoring, doting mother. I was rarely unhappy and, because I was given everything I needed, there was no reason for me to cry. When I did, it was at night, when it got dark. For some reason I thought I might have to disappear again into that dark tunnel, and I had visions of dark red blood, and I heard my mother’s agonized cries. In those moments the only way my mother and sisters could pacify me was by playing records on our old wind-up gramophone. They would put on all the records in the house, everything from ‘Temptation’ sung by Perry Como to ‘Cocktails for Two’ by Spike Jones. Even then I would nod off only when somebody forgot to take off the record. The sound of the needle rocking back and forth, in and out on the spiral, put me to sleep. Ah yes, happy days.’
It was no surprise to me that R.D. had enjoyed his infancy. It came across in his songs.
The air-conditioning had started to clear the room, but there was still a dark cloud of smoke floating above us.
R.D.’s face changed. When I say changed, it could have been only an eyebrow raised or a rounded smile turning into a curve of disapproval, but it had giant if subtle nuances. I mean, this was only a small look, but in less than the blink of an eye it had moved me to another world. It was as if a giant magnifying glass had been put up to his face and made it a thousand times larger: the tiniest emotion seemed like an earthquake.
R.D. became totally silent at this point. I could hardly hear him breathing. A small dark cloud, which had been hovering between us, took on a new shape. It rose slightly, then adjusted itself with a small motion. If it had eyes, it would have looked straight at me, inviting me over for a heavy discussion. I declined inwardly. It turned, almost smiling, as if to say, ‘You, another day.’ It moved in the direction of Raymond Douglas and placed itself over his head. Then, with almost erotic submissiveness, it surrendered itself and settled gently over his face, until it covered his entire head. The cloud was just a cloud, but it seemed to translate into an inner voice, both a message and a warning: ‘He is mine.’
I was struck by a panic attack. I tried to shout but no sound came out. My heart beat hard and a searing pain shot across my chest. I thumped my chest with a rapid panic: a ‘Come out! Come out!’ motion. Eventually, a sound came forth: ‘Speak. Say something. Don’t die. Speak.’
‘Sunlight. Trees. A woman’s voice. A child in a pram. Me. Eyes look up. Sunlight.’
His voice became my voice, but it sounded like a small child’s, a high-pitched and terrified monotone, like he was scrambling out a desperate message with his dying breath. Each word had a full stop, but there were whole pages between them.
‘Sunlight.
Trees.
Woman’s face.
A child in a pram.
Me.
Sunlight.’
This time it wasn’t his voice. It was mine. Suddenly I was inside him, speaking his thoughts, seeing the world through his eyes, observing with his vision. My hand reached down to my crotch and I scratched myself. This was not a habit of mine, but it was obviously something R.D. had done over the years. Perhaps I would get used to it. I was in no position to argue at this point.
It was strange, but I had actually started to enjoy the uneasy pleasure of being inside him. I tried to breathe normally, but my chest was not functioning with its usual efficiency. My joints did not feel as supple as before and I suddenly felt these dull patches under my skin, as if my blood was not flowing properly. I was just getting used to this new experience when I realized that he, or in my present circumstance, I, was beginning to turn into yet another person. The dark cloud hovered closer and began to engulf me. Then darkness and a flash of light. At first I thought that a lightbulb had blown, but then I felt as if I had been electrocuted. My body shook and I started to scream like an animal in pain, caught in a deadly trap. Such a hideous yell that when I covered my ears with my hands, the sound already inside my skull echoed around until it oscillated into feedback. The words became a string that was being stretched to breaking point. Tense. Strangled. Longer with each shriek. Sunlight. My sister. She is so young. Stop the car! My sister. She is so young.
The sound became so intense that I started to shout in order to cancel out his voice. To no avail. His voice took over mine and they became one, in perfect synchronization, until my persona had completely surrendered to his will. I began to see the sounds as pictures: clear, high-definition, 70-millimetre Technicolor Sensurround images; some moving, some static, all from another man’s past but all instantly recognizable to me. This time as I screamed for him I saw the images clearly. Sun, trees, woman’s face, a child, me, my sister, she is so young.
‘I saw the sun, trees and a woman, a child, which was me, all from a summer’s day long ago. Again, these people seemed like strangers to me and yet I knew every one of them. Then the sky became dark and I found myself being thrown to the gutter. A car’s headlights almost blinded me as I fell and rolled into its path. As the car ran over me, I found myself luckily placed in the centre, between the two sets of wheels. I felt the powerful engine as it roared inches away from my face, and was just marvelling at my escape when a piece of machinery struck my right arm and sent a dull thud down my side. The pain soon spread down my entire body. Then, as the car passed overhead, I felt a piece of metal tearing out my arm as it lifted my tiny body and dragged me along the road after it.
My inner movie cut to the tranquillity of the street. Sun. Trees. Woman. Me. Pram. I looked up at the woman, and as she smiled I saw what she was seeing. Down the tree-lined suburban street, I zoomed to my sister Peg: a beautiful sixteen-year-old with long blonde hair flowing across her face, and kissable red lips. Then down to the straight, padded shoulders on her post-war dress, beautiful breasts, slim waist and withered arm, a grotesque deformity poised claw-like and clutched beneath her right breast.
Peg of my heart; I’ll take you home again, Kathleen. My poor sister, she is so young; all that was missing was the hump.
I admired the way Peg carried her disfigurement. Perhaps it was because she was confident about the rest of her looks, for she was indeed the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Although her crippled arm was always apparent, even though she tried to conceal it, she was continually surrounded by good-looking young men eager to spend everything they had to wine, dine and win her favour.
This all happened before I was born and yet I was somehow born with her suffering smouldering inside me.
Another image. This time Peg was changing the nappy on a baby. I was confused, because although the baby was undeniably Peggy’s, the infant with the beautifully chubby bottom was as black as the ace of spades, with tight black curly hair. Was this a witch’s curse? Did black baby girls come as part of a package deal with a withered arm? I discovered that my kingdom was part of a larger empire that had colonies full of people whose skin came in various shades from brown to black. Peg had taken up with one of these black men who had come to my kingdom to find work, and, as a result, had become pregnant. Even though in England in the 1950s it was almost unheard of for a white family to bring up a black child, Peg decided to have the baby and take the inevitable consequences, which included ostracism by some ‘friends’ and neighbours. The father had fled back to Africa, but little black Jackie grew into a beautiful but strong-willed child, which was fortunate for her as she was to encounter hardships and prejudice as a result of being one of the first black children in the neighbourhood. Jackie could handle it though. She had the voodoo. Peg had a record by Billy Eckstine, a black American singer with a Jewish sounding name. The song was ‘That Old Black Magic’. For a while my mother would not allow the record to be played in the house, because it reminded her of the man who dishonoured my sister, but sometimes when she was not there one of my sisters would put it on the gramophone and the house would throb with sexy and subversive lyrics.
Listening to that song, knowing my sister’s circumstances, was my first insight into how a song could draw attention to the trials and tribulations of ordinary people.
For all I knew, my new niece Jackie could have been on this earth as a direct result of a pop song. Like Peggy, Jackie would survive. She had to. She grew, frizzy-haired and beautiful. The only black kid on the street.’
Suddenly my experience came to an abrupt end. I was not sure how or why I had experienced such a personal remembrance of another person, but I had. Raymond Douglas stopped talking and looked over towards the light. As his head turned, I saw the first thing that confirmed his identity to me: a long, thin scar running down the right side of his neck. I was just about to ask him where he got it when he pushed up a fader on the console in front of him and a sound resembling a sonic boom shook the whole room. Again, as if inside him, I experienced a jolting sensation, as if I were being thrown across time itself. I flinched, and as my eyelids flicked open and closed like the shutter in the camera, an image appeared on a screen in front of me and I saw myself running across another room. This time I found myself in the kitchen of R.D.’s mother. The adults tried to grab me but even as a four-year-old I was difficult to catch. Soon I had escaped from the main house and was running into the dark garden. R.D.’s voice became mine once again:
‘What motivated this sudden burst for freedom? I don’t know. It was either fear of something in the house or simple, blatant exhibitionism, an attempt to grab the spotlight from my newly born brother. The feeling of exhilaration as I dodged past the final outstretched adult hand was still with me as I fell. It was, for a split second, a truly magical feeling, like a sky-diver, fully horizontal, arms outstretched into the starry night. Then real stars as my face came to rest on a jagged rock. My nose and mouth seemed to disintegrate on impact. The next thing I remember is my Auntie Dollie holding me in her arms. I was crying, but my mouth was full of blood, broken teeth and snot, some of which had gone down my throat. My last images of this dramatic little scene were Auntie Dollie’s finely chiselled face as she tried to pacify me, then, my infant brother lying in his pram, abandoned by the rest of the family who were trying to mop up my blood. This was my first victory over my newly arrived adversary sleeping in the cot by the kitchen table. All the pain I was suffering was inconsequential. I was once again the centre of attention.
After this triumph came a series of dentists picking and chipping at my broken teeth. Countless injections of novocaine into my gums in a run-down surgery above a bicycle shop in the Holloway Road. There was no way of knowing how my second teeth would grow in, and the dentists said it would be best to defer any further treatment until they started to appear. My sinuses were damaged, and the doctors felt that they should also be left for nature to cure. As a result of that momentary lapse into exhibitionism I spent my early childhood waiting for signs of abnormality to show.’
As R.D. paused, I looked at my notepad. Everything had been written down in such detail that it was as if I had experienced it myself. R.D. looked exhausted.
‘That’s enough for one day. Now I must take my leave. Piss off, lad.’
I collected my belongings and left Raymond Douglas alone in his sad little control room.
That night I received a telephone call from Julie, the researcher from my office. She was full of questions about the interview. I was too ashamed to say that apart from a few sordid and somewhat dubious reminiscences about girlfriends and theories on homosexuality, I had in fact been able to scratch no deeper than most of the reports in the newspaper clippings that were in my briefcase. There was no way I was going to reveal my occasional jaunts into R.D.’s subconscious. She would have thought I was mad. Julie was professional enough not to pursue the issue and, after suggesting that I take her to dinner later that week, she wished me good luck and hung up.
I thought of seeing Julie on a purely social basis. We had met several times over coffee in the work canteen, but I had never had the confidence to ask her out. Now suddenly, out of the blue, I found myself being invited out by her. Julie was about 5 feet 6 inches tall; there was something about the way her long blonde hair framed her face that gave the impression she was more beautiful than she actually was. She was three years older than me and at twenty-two seemed to me to have experienced a great deal of life.
I took my sleeping pill and went to bed feeling that I had accomplished two great feats in one day: locating and starting my interviews with R.D., and being asked out by Julie. I closed my eyes and wondered what it would be like to kiss Julie on the lips, then to make love to her with the curtains open as R.D. had described making love to his old girlfriend. I felt the blood start to pump gently into my groin, but was too drowsy to take advantage of my erection. Then I thought of the dark cloud that had covered R.D.’s face. That must have been some cheap magician’s trick he had picked up on tour. He had, a reputation for theatrical pyrotechnics, after all.
Then I thought of Julie again and imagined her naked in bed next to me. As my head took that familiar chemical plunge into the depths of slumber my final thought was that even though I had just met him, R.D. had already started to corrupt me.
As I went under, for the first time I was grateful for the sleeping pills that prevented any form of dream world. Even so, just before I awoke I saw an image of a frightened crippled child being led into a building by a cruel nurse wearing a uniform so starched it emphasized her lack of emotion. I saw the child’s parents following behind. The hospital was Victorian and the shabby, freezing-cold halls stank of urine and disinfectant and echoed with the cries of sick infants. The two parents sat quietly while the nurse held up the child’s mutilated arm. The doctor looked on with sadistic pleasure as the child cried out with pain. The mother wept as the doctor informed her that the child’s arm had to come off to prevent infection. The child’s screams echoed around the cold, unsympathetic corridors as the doctor took out a large hacksaw to begin the amputation. The parents struggled with the doctor and eventually freed the child and ran out of the hospital.
I heard myself shouting: ‘Peggy. My sister. She is so young.’
I woke up in a cold sweat. I had experienced somebody else’s past’.
The following morning I walked towards R.D.’s studio like a zombie in a trance, but I had been taking sleeping pills for so long that I took their numbing effect for granted. On the other hand, Raymond Douglas was buzzing with energy. He picked up where he had left off the story of his childhood the day before.
‘To be abnormal in my kingdom was a pitiless existence, for in the world of children there is no compassion for freakishness of any kind.
For example there was a man whom I used to see walking around the streets in the suburb of north London where I grew up. A little figure with his head bowed, his sad face forced to look at the ground by a crooked humped back that followed him as he shuffled along like an embarrassed hanger-on, trying to keep up with the world. Some children used to laugh as he walked by. Others were too afraid of him to laugh. He was not an ugly person, but to young and perfectly formed bodies, this wretched little soul was the ugliest creature on God’s earth.
Imperfection is something children do not think about unless they are imperfect themselves. It is easy to ridicule the afflicted. They have no rights. Their thoughts and feelings are of no importance to an uncaring world. Pity is easy, but it is difficult to care. Like Peg. He knew his place, only his was lower because he was part of the legion of the world’s cripples. Banished to the back row of society with the other outcasts; to learn the ways of the half-wits and child molesters. The sexual deviants, wife-beaters and other lepers. The cripple, if he wishes to function in the world, must accept this role without question. Stand in the back of the class with the other dunces and eat humble pie with the unemployed and the unemployable. As I was the centre of my own little world, I could not entertain the thought of being imperfect in any way. But as I watched the hump-backed man hobble down the high street, I said a silent prayer for myself, because something inside told me that I, the king, was at one with this unfortunate individual. At the age of ten I had been hurt in a soccer match, which resulted in severe pain in my lower back. My mother had taken me to the local doctor for a consultation. As I walked over to his desk I heard him ask about my family medical history, and whether my back problem might be hereditary. Then the doctor approached me, my mother cowered into a corner with her head bowed, and I stood still as the doctor walked around me. I played a guessing game: which part of me would he prod first? Dr Aubrey stood behind me and remained silent apart from the sound of his slow, asthmatic breaths. I stared at a large photograph of soldiers standing in a field during the Boer war where the doctor had served as a young man. Dr Aubrey had framed it and hung it on the wall. I felt his cold hands gently prodding my lower back, and I immediately thought of the hunchback, and how my world would be shattered if I was forced to trudge the streets with a hump on my back, like the little man. Surely kings cannot be cripples? I was contemplating my abdication speech when I remembered that Richard III had a hump, and even Ivan the Terrible was supposed to have had a bad back. The doctor’s thumb pressed each vertebra as he worked his way up my spine. As he pressed he muttered the occasional words: ‘Play soccer? Swim-lumbar-Harley-Street-specialist-X-rays.’
Before the doctor touched me I had been perfectly normal. I knew that if he had not pointed out the problem, then perhaps it would have gone away. Instead here I was, coming to terms with the fact that I was a cripple. As I left the surgery, Dr Aubrey looked at me over his bifocals and smiled, which made him look like Winston Churchill. He said to my mother, who was leading me out of the consulting room, ‘Mrs Davies, that boy of yours will become a preacher. Believe me. I can not only tell a man’s ailment, but also his occupation in his face and by the manner he walks into the room. Mark my words, that boy will become a preacher.’
A preacher, I thought. Perhaps, but still a cripple.
I started to think about how to cope with my deformity when it finally became visible to the world. Would I wake up one morning to discover a large lump on my shoulder? Would a magic walking stick arrive in the post and turn me into an instant cripple? Perhaps Harley Street would be the place where they would suddenly give me the hump. I was due to see a specialist; perhaps such debilitating growths had to be administered by a specialist. The old hunchback continued to walk around north London, as busy and self-contained as ever. I began to study him so that I could develop his techniques. Perhaps there would be side benefits, such as priority seating at football matches and on buses. I had often seen cripples get preferential treatment; pushed to the front of queues and so on. I decided that it would be far better if I were confined to a wheelchair, then there would be no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ about my disability. A plain, common-place hunchback looked almost normal compared to a wheelchair case, and the latter generated much more pity. If I was to be a freak, I would go all the way.
Now that I was resigned to my fate I found myself walking home more upright and confident. Each day I looked in the mirror to see if anything had appeared. Each day, to my disappointment, there was only pain, and no visible evidence. How annoying that I should be in pain and the world should see no evidence of what I had to endure. The whole situation was beginning to irritate me so much that I decided to take the matter into my own hands and accept that I was a cripple on the inside, so that I would be psychologically ready to accept the deformity when it eventually surfaced. I wanted physical evidence. A sign. Something for the world to see. An X-ray. But even an X-ray showed only the bones, the physical inside. The soul was not visible. The soul. The one part of a person that cannot be seen. Or touched.’
Raymond Douglas suddenly stopped talking. There followed a long silence, almost as if his brain had frozen over solid, leaving him in mid-sentence. For a moment I thought that because as a child of the sixties he may have done too much acid. It is well known that former addicts exhibit similar symptoms: they start on one subject, then, after a minute or so, move on to an event which occurred at a totally different time in their life. We had started at pre-birth; gone straight on to when he was four years old; and now we had suddenly jumped ahead to when he was ten. And all the while that black cloud still hovered. I knew that it was only a matter of time before it descended on one of us.
I said brightly, to lighten the atmosphere, ‘How about a nice cup of tea?’
I knew he liked tea. His references to it over the years had elevated it to a level with bread and wine at Holy Communion. He had compared tea to the finest wine, had promoted it to the extent that its powers of healing rivalled that of any witch’s brew. But the black cloud had descended again:
‘Tea?’ he answered weakly. ‘I would, but the water’s not fit to boil. There’s no water for it.’
I tried to sound optimistic, but only succeeded in sounding like a nurse: ‘Since the water is boiled up, it will taste grand.’
‘No, the water has too much lead. And the tea bags are made in a factory. Nobody drinks real leaves anymore.’ R.D. was starting to sound, and look, pathetic and old. But I knew it was a ruse. ‘Well, I’m going to have a cup. You can have some if you like.’
What was I doing? Was I playing into his hands? I went to a little kitchen down the corridor, found some tea bags and brewed up some strong tea. Fortunately, there was an old Brown Betty teapot, which would add authenticity to the occasion.
I arrived back in the control room to find R.D. sitting in exactly the same position as when I had left. According to what I had read, this was one of his standard ploys: he deluded his companions into believing him to be so feeble that they would indulge his slightest whim. Then he would snap back, full of energy, and with a barrage of devastating vitriolic comments. It was at moments like these that he was at his most dangerous. He was more than just temperamental. He was a total energy vampire. Exhausting to be with, and yet with such mystique that it was impossible to leave: if his mood changed all the energy would come pouring back.
I sat down opposite him and set down two mugs. One of them was a souvenir made to commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I diligently obeyed the ritual of the tea-making ceremony, knowing full well that any slip on my part would bring about the severest of reprimands before the final rejection and eventual dismissal. I poured the hot tea into the mugs, then added just enough milk to bring it to a rich, watery brown. I knew it was important to ensure that the milk was added while the tea was still moving around in a whirlpool. This would guarantee that the milk blended with the tea in a natural flow, rather than with the aid of a spoon. That would have been vulgar, according to Raymond Douglas’ book. A slip in etiquette. Spoons are only used as a last resort. As he moved forward into the light, I noticed his eyebrow raised at my compliance with his tradition. I even detected a faint glimmer of approval in his eyes, and a slight pout of his lips. The old queen liked me. I was in.
He wrapped his hands around the Coronation mug and told me how, as a child, he had been allowed to watch Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation on his sister’s old black-and-white television.
‘What a beautiful day it was, the coronation. A day off from school, flags waving from every house. Coronation. The word just epitomizes empire, Commonwealth, good winning over evil. The Queen’s Coronation was very erotic: a country standing to attention like a mass erection. I possibly had the first hard-on of my life on Coronation day. It had something to do with all these old men in heavy cloaks, paying homage to this young, beautiful woman at Westminster Abbey. The sexiest part was when they surrounded the throne with screens so that the world could not see what was going on. Even good old Richard Dimbleby, who was doing the television commentary, spoke in a whisper, as if he was not supposed to be there. To me the whole idea of millions watching something forbidden and hidden from them struck me as being rather special. Historians may well prove me wrong, but the times one thirty or quarter past three spring to mind as being those of ultimate erotic anointment. I remember those times most vividly. The rest is just horses hooves clumping down Whitehall and little Union Jacks being waved by featureless blurs. Boring stuff on the black-and-white nine-inch TV screen.’
R.D. held the mug in his two hands, staring down into it. Once the tea had cooled to the right temperature, he slowly lifted it to his lips and took a long sip. It seemed to revive him, and even made him look younger. It also gave him strength enough to put up that formidable barrier between us. Before we were completely separated by this emotional wall, I decided to lunge in with my next question. But before I had the chance to speak, he answered:
‘It is difficult to explain the way creative vampires work. There is no blood involved, no cloves of garlic nor crucifixes. It is hard to explain except through a fairy-story. Do you believe in fairy-stories?’
He did not wait for a reply.
‘Then I will begin. Once upon a time there was a room in a house called the Front Room. It was so named because it was at the front of the house, by the street. It was reserved for special occasions: Christmas parties, wedding receptions, birthdays, christenings and funerals all took place in the front room. Important visitors were always shown into it. It was also the official sickroom when there was an illness serious enough to call a doctor to the house. The sick person was moved down from one of the upstairs bedrooms to the front room. Guests slept there. People laughed, cried there. My sisters courted their boyfriends in there. Every special time and occasion was celebrated in the front room. The first time that I, Raymond Douglas, saw David Russell, my baby brother, was in the front room just after he had been born. I was ushered in by a careful relative and told to remain silent. I peered around the bedpost and saw my mother holding this purple-faced, newly born brother in her arms.
I remember that first shock of being presented with a rival brother, but I learned to treat this person as a companion rather than an interloper. A few years later we played cowboys and Indians in the front room. From behind the armchairs that served as rocks in the American Wild West, I emerged as a cowboy after being attacked by an Apache Indian, invariably played by my long-suffering brother. I fell from the settee on to the floor and lay dead until my vicious murderer came to scalp me. As David Russell quietly came close to me with a rubber knife in his hand, ready to scalp his seemingly unconscious brother, I sprang to life and smashed him across the side of the face with the wooden handle of my toy shotgun. Tears flowed and I hid behind the full-length curtains by the front-room window while David Russell tearfully ran to Mum in the kitchen.
David Russell and I had become companions, but I had not completely forgiven my brother for invading my turf. And although Mum punished me for such violent behaviour, I knew that my sentence was always half as severe as it should have been, because I was the first boy in a family of girls.
However, I did not entirely escape punishment. I was punished by my own conscience. As I slept at night I had a recurring dream. My brother and I were playing on the edge of a cliff. David Russell slipped over the edge and I grabbed him as he fell. There we would stay, one brother literally holding the other’s life in his hands. As the dream turned into a nightmare, I felt my sibling’s hand slip from my grasp, and the pathetic cries from my falling brother caused me to wake, shouting and sweating. As I looked over at my brother sleeping peacefully in the next bed, I knew that I would always have to protect this interloper, even though I could never quite forgive him for spoiling my solitary but idyllic existence.
Later, the front room became the place where we learned to play music on the old family upright piano our parents had bought from Berry and Co. in the Holloway Road.
Our older sisters played all of their be-bop records on the radiogram in the bay by the window of the front room. Then, as the sisters grew, they put on records by Johnny Ray, Perry Como, Jo Stafford, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Kay Starr, Hank Williams, Slim Whitman, and did the latest dances with their most recent boyfriends. Everything from the tango to the creep, the smooch to boogie-woogie, jive to early rock and roll: Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis and Little Richard, the Ted Heath Band, Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan.
Later we brothers brought home records of our own early guitar heroes: Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry, Duane Eddy, James Burton (who played the solos on Ricky Nelson’s records), Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Christian, Tal Farlow, Johnny and the Hurricanes, Les Paul again. All of them played on the radiogram in the front room. When we had our first rehearsals, they all took place in the front room. Sometimes, the neighbours from next door complained and on several occasions even called in the police.
Once David brought home a little 8-watt valve amplifier that he got in a secondhand shop. It became known as ‘the green amp’. The green amp amplified our guitars at our early performances in local pubs, when both of us were barely teenagers. Later, with a friend from Coldfall estate, Pete Quaife, we played at a ballroom in Muswell Hill, all of us plugging into the green amp. The green box was not powerful enough for all three of us, the crowd couldn’t hear, and the derisive boos and howls from the teddy boys and spivs at the Atheneum Ballroom, forced the manager to administer the ‘theatrical hook’, dragging us offstage while we were still playing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. The group was dragged off, but the green amp, attached by the umbilical cord of our guitars, continued to perform. Eventually even the green amp followed and departed the stage. (It was eventually to be replaced by a Watkins dominator, an amplifier of more volume, but less character.)
Back in the front room, partly out of the desire to sound as distorted as the fuzzy guitar on Memphis Tennessee and partly out of frustration with Mum and Dad’s radiogram, which by now, due to excessive volume, had blown a valve, David took some of Mum’s knitting needles and stuck them into the speakers of the little green amp. He christened it the fart box.
It’s hard to describe that old front room. It had a magical quality. I felt that in some strange way God was always there, judging and giving guidance where necessary. I went to a Church School, but the closest I felt to God and religion was not in St James’s Church, but in the front room.
It’s equally hard to describe one’s work. The motives behind it, the reasons and circumstances. So difficult now.
At school, particularly when I was ten or eleven, I was suffocated by the amount of normality that I was subjected to. I knew how to count, and yet they, the teachers, pushed all these complex forms of mathematics down my throat. I could read, but I wasn’t allowed to read what I wanted. I was force-fed the school syllabus, and all because it was deemed to be the standard. The norm. I was not particularly bright in the sense that I could only absorb information that interested me. Anything else either put me to sleep or made me physically ill. And some old bastard had decided that children should be judged at the age of eleven so that they could be segregated for the rest of their lives. No consideration was given for talents outside the limited range required by the examining board. That would have enabled the normal thinkers to go to normal schools that would have sent them on to average universities where they would have received adequate diplomas before returning to normal society. Instead the misfits were destined to become factory fodder, farm workers or manual workers like my father, with no incentive to achieve or realize their potential. The segregation had nothing to do with intelligence. It was more where you lived, how active your parents were in the parent-teacher association, how you spoke, what you wanted to be, how you fitted in, how often you went to church.
I sat at my desk on the day of my Eleven Plus exam and looked at my paper. I felt that it was more than my intelligence that was being tested. It was my whole being, my philosophy, my feelings for the world, my family, my dreams, hopes and habits were all to be put up for grading by the Greater London Examining Board. I had to decide either to play the game their way, and succeed or fail according to their rules, or take my own route. I decided to settle my own fate. I signed my name at the top of the paper, and did nothing more for the rest of the exam. The room was silent, apart from the anxious scratching of pencils, and yet inside my head was a triumphant explosion, like the opening cannon shot of war. I had made my first statement to the world. But it was also like watching opportunity float away on a piece of paper down the river. It would damage me, but at the same time it was a victory. For the first time in my life I realized that it would be a battle between me and them.’
R.D.’s description of the Eleven Plus saddened me. My classless society had come too late for him. Wanting to know more about his schooling I asked if he had had a problem with numbers, but this only served to move him to another series of remembrances.
‘Numbers and calculations, subtractions, divisions into the particles thereof. Thirteen. Seventh child added to a seventh child should logically equal fourteen, but in my case it was unlucky thirteen. Why is it two lucky numbers can add up to an unlucky one?
She stood by the door, my sister Rene. The eldest of my six sisters. She was thirty years old and it was my thirteenth birthday. Outside the window of my parents’ house in London N2, it was the day before midsummer. The sun was shining but it put a hard glow around everything it touched. The trees cast a cool shadow across the front door where Rene was standing. She walked in and looked into the front room, where I was sitting. Half in the room, half out. Dressed in her smart topcoat, with her immaculate, permed fair hair covered by a little hat. She looked so old.
Rene had married a Canadian soldier called Bob, who was based in London at the end of the Second World War. Bob was half American Indian and was given to bouts of heavy drinking back in Oshawa, where they had gone to live. As a result, Bob and Rene’s marriage had fallen on to hard times. Mum often received letters full of horror stories about drinking, fighting and physical abuse. I was young and unconcerned with who was right and who was wrong, but I learned to anticipate the air of doom that descended on the household every time those dreaded blue airmail letters arrived from Canada.
Long before, when Rene was just a teenager herself, Dr Aubrey had diagnosed a rheumatic heart. ‘The child will not live past thirty,’ the doctor had whispered to my mother as my unsuspecting sister left after the examination, but Rene went on to dispel any doubts about her health and became a fine athlete and artist. She was well on the way to becoming an art teacher when she was swept off her feet by Bob just after the war. They married and emigrated to Canada.
It was Rene who, when she came back to visit us, brought the first Elvis Presley records I ever heard. ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Don’t be Cruel’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ were soon blasting away all the syrupy big-band ballads, and it was Rene who, while describing Elvis’ performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, first used the word ‘sexy’ to me. ‘When that guy’s hips moved, the hairs on my back stood up so stiff I felt like a porcupine.’ It was Rene who had held me up when I was born and shown my sisters my ‘little pee-pee’ and it was Rene, on an earlier visit to England, who first noticed the sadness in me. One night she crawled into my bed so that I would not be afraid of the dark and had promised to stay there until the sadness went away.
Now, on the last day of her life, she spoke softly and clearly to me, her sharp Canadian accent still dominant over her north London drone. Every word seemed to be uttered with breathless care.
‘Thirteen, it’s Rayday. A teenager. Do you know that today is your first day for growing up?’
Rene was on heavy medication, and because of this she sometimes spoke on different levels to the rest of us. This was nothing unusual. As she stood half in, half out of the front room, she proudly held out my birthday present: a brand new Spanish guitar.
‘Now you can learn all those songs you hear on the gramophone and play them on your own guitar.’
‘What about you,’ I asked. ‘Will you play them with me?’
I picked up the guitar and tuned it as best I could. Rene sat at the piano. She started to play a familiar show tune from Oklahoma! which suited her vamping piano style. It was typical ‘play by ear’, which nearly everybody in the family could emulate at the get-togethers at Christmas, weddings and any other excuse Dad could find for a party. The piano sounded a little out of tune and gave the high notes a screeching quality. I tried to accompany Rene, and she slowed down so that I could slot in with my limited technique. She finished and stared at the piano.
‘That was good.’
She took a deep breath and got up from the piano. Then she walked over and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
‘Don’t be sad, Ray, and there’s no reason to look so unhappy. Practise your guitar and make sure they give that old piano a tune up.’
She walked out to the front gate where my mum had been standing for a while. I stood by the window but couldn’t quite hear what was said. It was an exchange that seemed too private for anyone to hear. Very little was actually said, it was more like a slow-motion silent movie, but delicately acted, and with no need for subtitles. After a few minutes Rene walked up the road to the bus stop. Mum stood and stared up the suburban road long after Rene had disappeared. The image of my mother standing at the gate was still in my head when I heard of Rene’s death the following morning. Rene had been ordered to stay in bed by the doctor. She had been told that if she had another attack, it would be fatal. Rene, who had always loved to dance, had made her mind up to go to a ballroom in the West End. It was my birthday and she had bought me a guitar, played the family piano for the last time and gone to the Lyceum Ballroom, where she had collapsed and died while the orchestra played a song from Oklahoma!
After Rene’s funeral my mother called her husband all the foul names she could string together. Made all the accusations a woman in her situation usually makes. The poor man just sat in his chair and allowed my mother to slap his face. He could only say that for all his obvious faults, he loved his wife. It was then that I swore never to love anyone in a way that would hurt other people. I soon learned that getting hurt is part of being in love. I had seen Rene’s husband drunk a lot, and violent. I saw my dad drunk a lot. I’ve been drunk a lot. I’ve been violent. Perhaps people are violent with the ones they love because there is a wound in them. A fragment of emotional shrapnel lodged in their hearts from the battleground of romance. It’s not just like that corny old song, you always hurt the one you love. They hit the one they love and then they wail like a wounded animal, as if they were the one injured. Perhaps love twists itself inside out and sees itself distorted in a mirror. Then despises the reflection and wants to destroy itself.
We all have our own personal Satan, like we all have our own God. When he sees our love twisted, the little red man in all of us turns and smiles because he has become all-powerful. Truth becomes deceit, innocence turns to guilt.
At the drunken wake which followed Rene’s funeral, and for many Christmases afterwards, I would cringe in fear and embarrassment as my family sang ‘Goodnight Irene’ and ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’. Even as a thirteen-year-old I could not bear to see adults reduced to this cheap show of emotion. On reflection, perhaps I was as moved as they were, but I forced myself to be ashamed because I could not tolerate love and grief being treated in such an ordinary way. They were singing popular pub songs to externalize their feelings of loss; I wanted to hear angels singing unearthly chords of unimaginable beauty. But all I heard was that pitiful singsong full of tears, beer and cigarette breath. An Auntie kissed me and spilled her Babycham. My father took a swig of beer as he slid down the wall and spilled the rest on the carpet. My mother sliced another sandwich and shouted who wanted mustard. Another Auntie’s false teeth fell out as she hit the top note in the chorus of ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’. My sister was dead, her body turned into ashes and the only song they could sing was this. Perhaps this was all they had.
Throughout my childhood those songs we sang at family parties reflected our joys and tragedies: our romantic inhibitions unlocked by Mario Lanza singing a popular love ballad, our fears and anxieties calmed by a George Formby ditty; passions were aroused by songs made popular by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn spoke for our lost love in ‘We’ll Meet Again’; Cab Calloway gave my father Fred a chance to step out for an imaginary rendezvous with ‘Minnie the Moocher’, while Nat King Cole soothed and calmed a troubled heart. Everyone in the family had their own theme song. Slim Whitman sang ‘Rosie Marie’ and ‘Indian Love Call’ for my eldest sister Rosie and her husband Arthur. Mum drooled over a record called ‘St Teresa of the Roses’ by somebody called Malcolm Vaughn, a sort of syrupy, opera-style ballad. Soon the family became hip to the more up-to-date pop songs (apart from Dad, who remained loyal to ‘Minnie the Moocher’). We went through our performances in ritualistic sequence. Dave and I acted as DJs until it was time for us to pick our guitars and perform our party piece. Eventually it was Dad’s turn, and he would stagger over to the piano and belt out a song. He was often so drunk that he would not so much sing the words as assume the attitude of the lyrics so that an impression of what they meant came across. Then he would trip over the carpet during his hoochie-coochie dance routine, thus bringing his performance to a premature end. He always went down a storm with the audience, even though we had seen it many times before. Then it was time for Mum’s finale. Tears flowed from her eyes as she sang along to ‘St Teresa of the Roses’, and Dave added to her misery by turning the volume up full. Because of a distorted speaker, poor Malcolm Vaughn, who was quite an accomplished tenor, ended up sounding like Louis Armstrong.
The only part of Rene left that I could identify with were the Elvis Presley records and the guitar she had given me. I felt that if these were to remain a fixture in my world, then I would have to withdraw emotionally, leaving my body to live another existence.’